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I like PoE, but god damn, talk about why the game is good instead of just trying to sell it off some other game's success because its in the same genre. it's about just as different as d3 is if not more. literally every system is different aside from basic functions of the game, such as movement and health. the stat system, the skill system, the class system.

PoE fans need to stop trying to sell it as "the new d2" and start trying to sell it as a good game. PoE has a lot to offer. I promise it will work.

The only people who think D2 received hate at release are those who didn't play at release and just read a few forum threads years later. Most of the people who actually played D2 fell in love with it. D3's launch was completely different...

D2 did in fact receive quite a bit of hate. That's not to say the game was bad, because we all know it wasn't. But I was around at the time and clearly remember a few forums that did nothing but talk bad about the game.

Every game gets hate. Some get a little some get a lot. What I'm saying is that it was NOWHERE near what D3 is getting. It was more like 90% positive 10% negative compared to the 90% negative 10% positive of D3.

The stuff about D2 hate or not is irrelevant. When D2 came out nobody knew what end game was. It was a single player game that was tip toeing into multiplayer.

The whole concept of trading and farming wasn't really a thing so there was no basis on which to judge it.

On the basis at which we understood D2 when it was launched D3 is fine (but still not as good as D2). However the modern Diablo is all about the multiplayer and end game and it was rightly judged on this factor.

To be honest, Diablo 2 was a pioneer in the hack & slash genre. Sure there were some similar aRPGS before it, but it was the first true hack n slash with such a big world. It was reasonable to net get all the things at first..

D3 had immensely more knowledge about aRPGS. Just a few that worth mentioning: d2, Titan Quest, Torchlight, Sacred 1&2 and Loki. And they still managed to make something with little re playability..

Diablo 3 got very good reviews from critics before it was released, but the Diablo 2 award was voted by the readers of the magazine. Player reaction to Diablo 3 has been terrible. It was was voted 3.8 on Metacritic which is one of the worst scores for any game ever.

This whole discussion aside, Metacritic user ratings don't mean squat giving that they're a cesspit of trolls trolling trolls. The scores are representative of no one except a select few insular communities of circlejerking trolls. Just for perspective, a userscore from a site where Diablo 3 has a lower score than Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing can be used in no serious discussion, ever.

Metacritic and Amazon are both inherently flawed in that they A) have no way of knowing if you actually own or even have played the game you're reviewing and B) don't restrict you to a single account.

Each time there's a "let's troll metacritic for teh luls" megathread on /b/ and/or /v/, there's a couple hundred new votes added in the 0-3 range (which, assuming you attempt to attribute some objective value to the arbritrary scoring system, is obviously too low for a game like D3 regardless of its flaws). Around D3 release, their focus was pretty much entirely on D3.

Furthermore, controversy sparks participation and people are much more likely to speak out, repeatedly and loudly, against things they don't like than they are to defend things they like. Let's take a couple of recently released highly rated titles, Guild Wars 2 and Dishonored. Those have 1336 and 1935 ratings, respectively.

Diablo 3 has 7837, 2956 of which are overwhelmingly negative. Yeah.

So in conclusion, metacritic userscores are generally dubious at best for a wide variety of reasons. And what little relevance they typically can maintain by reflecting the "average guy", is completely and utterly destroyed with D3's userscore in particular; it's laughably useless given the sheer, ridiculous amounts of trolling and nerdrage that's been sent its way due to the "controversy" surrounding it.

I agree that people likely to vote on a game they hate than a game that felt neutral on which means the 3.6 score would be quite a lot lower than the score you got if you got a polling company to survey everyone who played the game. However as people who love a game are also more likely to vote that doesn't make the score meaningless. It shows that there were a lot of people who hated the game and not so many who loved it.

No polling company is going to do a survey, so sites like Metacritic and Amazons are the best we can do if we want to be objective about player reaction to a game. I accept it's far from perfect though.

You would expect there to a lot more votes for D3 than the other games because so many people pre-ordered the game and is pretty clear from the forums, a large percentage of them hated it and as I said people who hate a game are more likely to vote.

People rate products on Amazons in order to improve their recommendations and so the Amazon score should reflect the "average guys" opinion better than Metacritic.

I don't read 4chan but I can't see any reason to think the only reason these scores are so low is because they have been manipulated. They seem in line with what I've read on the forums. I accept you recognise that D3 was flawed but isn't it possible that there a lot of people who think the game was a lot more flawed than you did and that's the reason it has such low scores?

If you look at reviews on Amazons, you will see they are generally positive from the start. Diablo 3 has some of the most negative reviews of any game ever released.

Blizzard used to have a reputation for waiting to release a game so on day one it was in a state that you would expect from other producers after months of patching, but then continue to patch it to make it even better anyway.

A few people will always complain about any game, but Diablo 2 was liked by most people from the start.

D2 Launch player here, I was a ripe young 15 year old when it released. I remeber getting it and staying over at a friends he also got as well and we played for days not just hours. Yeah it had some roughness to its launch but damn it was fun and we were hooked.

Oh and for good measure and to add more to the dicussion I really like Diablo 3 and plan on playing both it and Path of Exile. You can also add Torchlight 1 and 2 to that list. All of them are great games.

See Reddit you can like them all. They all have their pros and cons. None of them are perfect, except maybe Diablo 2 ;)

Aside from some server problems the first few months D2 was absolutely as good as LoD(IMO it was way better). The D2 classic community stayed active for many years after LoD. Many of us didn't like things like repetitive baal runs, teleport for all classes (enigma), everyone wearing the same items (runewords) instead of rare items, leeching your way to 99, bots (bots didn't exist in classic), hardcore being easymode etc. I got to level 99 hc in about 2 weeks when LoD launched, went back to classic and never looked back. And before you cry "nostalgia", I played it in 2010 and again in 2012 a few weeks before the D3 launch. It is as fun as ever, but very few players still play in public games (in hc at least).

Is that so?
Or was it a lack of alternative and - once released - a playerbase-momentum?

Diablo 2 in it's release form was, from our current perspective, pretty bad. Boring as hell clickfest, useless item grind, unnerving playability issues, and frankly absolutely no content left to do after ~4 weeks max.
LoD especially fixed a few of these things, the rest took a fairly long time and amount of patches to evolve.
By which time other games were out, but D2 still had the largest userbase.

You're comparing a game from a decade ago to a game today, that just doesn't work.

Diablo 2 was amazing the second it launched because it revolutionized the genre, you can say it sucks by todays standards but back then people had a blast playing it as it was completely different from what they've seen before.

One day we will have a holodeck and every game of today will be considered a piece of shit by those standards, it doesn't actually mean that todays games are bad though, it's just that our expectations of them changed.

Diablo 2 was amazing the second it launched because it revolutionized the genre

Not hard to revolutionize a genre that only really had one game in it. There were essentially no competitors to Diablo in the four years between Diablo and Diablo 2, and Diablo 2 largely ended up being the same game with unique spells for each character.

I'd also disagree that it was amazing the second it launched; I got the game on launch day and found myself fairly underwhelmed. More to the point, the itemization was terrible in the vanilla game and the Unique items were massively underwhelming. Sound familiar? Everyone just horded rares that had the few available good stats on them. Useful Uniques came around with the expansion, as well runewords, jewels, and a fair amount of the other things that expanded Diablo 2's end game.

Diablo 2 was a decent enough game at launch, but it was far from the masterpiece people seem to think it was.

But that's sort of my point. D3 just as a "shiney D2" wouldn't work. Even as an "improved" D2, I have serious doubts. Case in point, the only interesting thing about Path of Exile to me is the spheroboard. Because that is the one element I haven't played endless times before, yet.
Everything else is a rehash of gameplay concepts which were fun years ago, but as I grew older I came to dislike the rather... braindead... gameplay.
It works well for multiplayer with voicecomm or local, because it allows you to freely chat while playing, making it a really cool experience. But as a game it's not deep enough.

I don't know.. aRPGS will always have borderline braindead gameplay.. THe whole point is the character development.. Unless you become strong enough you will run and spam portals and wear the monsters down slowly..

D3 didn't even have that.. It was a pure gear check the whole game. No character development, no skill involved.

PoE changes that a bit.. You have so many choices.. Even the pots you will carry.

To an extent, yes. Torchlight 2 sold a million copies. However, I did see on forums many people expecting the game to be the second coming of Diablo 2 and it was anything but that. As gamers, we need to look past the nostalgia goggles of our favorite titles and appreciate an attempt at trying something new.

But a second coming of D2 would not be positive. The game was hated madly upon release, and in many cases for good reason. It needed tons of patches and a very very large xpack to evolve to a playable game.

This is what never shocks me with Blizz fanboys. Blatant hypocrisy. The same people complaining another game has front page attention will praise D3 or WoW for being on the front page constantly. Look at Blizz related posts on r/gaming that hit the front page. Mainly nothing but traditional cosplay brought up for the sake of waning numbers on Reddit. Or the "spam" of childish customer server reports. Who the hell gets mad when a company uses a game that had a failed sequel as a means of advertisement. Not only that but it isn't even PoE developers calling it this. This is the only time I have heard someone say such stupidity when the person doing the article has a legit reason to call it that way.

Really? Does it explain what happens to Tyrael and continue the story where LOD left off? Because if it doesn't then it isn't the Diablo II sequel I wanted.

Diablo III wasn't either, of course, but all these people trying to substitute someone's pet hamster with a tropical fish. They're really not the same thing at all and I doubt you'll get far substituting one for the other.

See, hearing that actually made me like the game more. I like that you're going to start as a slow, clunky asshole and as time goes on, and as you fight more and gain experience, you're getting stronger, faster, etc. It makes for a bit of a bad experience to start, but I have it in my mind now that if I stick with it good things will happen.

They had to balance the base stats with the knowledge that you can get a pretty decent amount of attack speed and move speed buffs/passives. It's a necessary evil for making sure endgame doesn't get out of control. I don't really like the slow start either, but it is what it is.

I agree. It feels slow, and the skill tree is massive and annoying. I'm sure someone will come up with a gamebreaking build soon enough that everyone will cookie cutter, just like every other game like this.

What's up with all the PoE spam guys? I've seen PoE spam posts like 3-4 successive days in a row...

PoE going into open beta this week!!
PoE OPEN BETA IN 22 HOURS!!!
PoE OPEN BETA IS NOW UP!!
PoE is the D2 sequel you always wanted!!!

The annoying thing is that they've all hit the front page. I get that people are excited for their favourite game, but when the front page of /r/games has multiple posts on the same thing, I think it's safe to say that anyone who had the least interest in it has already got it and the rest of us don't care, ok?

Admittedly the spam posts were out of control with this game, but that doesn't mean that it isn't worth checking out. I'm really excited to get some playing time this weekend once I finish up the story in Borderlands 2.

I'm wondering why more people aren't upset by the fact that this game has always-on DRM. Is it because the game is free to play, unlike Diablo 3? People have harped on D3 for its DRM since the online requirement was announced, yet I haven't seen it mentioned once in Path of Exile discussions.

Personally, I never cared about DRM so I don't care that it's here either, just an observation on the reactions.

Anyhow, first impressions are that the game is interesting, though definitely unfinished. The skill tree is daunting, but looks to present plenty of options for customization, which I feel is a must in this genre. The combat feels...unsatisfying through the first few levels. I have a few abilities attached to my weapon, but they barely have any impact behind them. Feels like I'm swinging a butter knife at times. I imagine this will improve as my character gets stronger, though. Could be designed to make you feel weaker at low levels and slowly gain more power, unlike something such as D3, which had powerful maneuvers available from the onset.

The fact that the characters I've met so far keep telling me how lucky I am to be alive, I'm guessing it really is designed to make you feel weaker in the beginning.

I'm intrigued by the game, for sure. There's a lot that seems to be going on and I'm sure it's only going to get better as I progress and as the development team refines the game for its actual release.

I think the key difference is that one is a game people want to hate, and the other is a game that people want to love. That's the way with pretty much anything, most people aren't really able to be objective about things. If path of exile didn't have this much of a following, they'd be using the drm thing as an argument to tell us how shit it is.

Then they also go on to post the defenses that were rejected when applied to D3. If we allow offline play, people will steal our content and develop cheats! Also, internet only goes down in third world countries.

Always on and always online can work. However you have to give fans a compelling reason for going down that path. D3 sort of does. What really hurt D3 was that group play was so much harder than single play.

I'm wondering why more people aren't upset by the fact that this game has always-on DRM.

They were up front and honest about it. The lack of a single player in D3 was a bit of a nasty shock, especially after paying $60 up front, and is to this date the only game I've ever gotten a refund for.

I think the core difference is PoE offers the beneficial side of being always on with being always online, with lots of interesting leagues and online integration on launch of beta (You can view your chars online).

Where as D3 did it without really offering anything other than the auction houses which are questionable as to their impact.

D3 then went further and gimped it somewhat limiting to 10 char slots (for a game that cost $60+ depending on location) vs PoE's 24 (plus more for a little cash), and you can play your characters on any server with PoE, not just the one you rolled on.

And speaking o servers, there is one in Singapore for the SEA community.

D3 gave people a reason to hate the always online component, PoE does not.

The DRM is explained, not obnoxious, and honestly not that stringent (You don't have an internet connection? well how did you get a gaming pc into your hovel?)

The problem with D3's DRM wasn't that it was there, its that it was there and it was a huge inconvenience. The servers were swamped and denied access for way too long, and the looming RMAH added a mustache-twirlingly evil overtone to it all.

PoE is similar to steam. Sure the DRM is there and isn't at all minor, but its also not in the way, and is therefore not even noticed by most players.

The servers for PoE are currently swamped and I can't even download the client. I understand they're probably trying their hardest and don't have the resources to support the interest, but that's the "problem" with an always-online game. Right now I don't have a lot of faith in their servers to handle an always-on game.

Granted, I don't really care about this kind of DRM because I'll just play something else if the servers are down, but it's literally the exact same problem that people have with Diablo 3. The only defense for PoE is that it's free so deal with it. I actually think that's a pretty good defense, but don't try and come up with other reasons why this DRM is better than that DRM.

I played for about a couple of hours, and it just didn't click with me, but I'm glad the genre is expanding because I love ARPGS. I'll continue spending most of my time in D3, and watch this closely for updates!

You can play alone. Towns are lobbies, and there is a bulletin board that acts as a group finder. Once you leave town, though, it creates a separate instance for only you, and you are playing by yourself. It still has waypoints and all that. The instance only resets when you haven't been in it for about 15 minutes, so you don't actually have to restart a game if you want to farm somewhere again or backtrack for grinding. The only downside is that, if you idle in town, your TP will disappear after the area resets.

From what I've gleaned, you can play totally alone. In town you'll probably see a few people but the moment you go into a 'combat' sort of area, your in a separate instance unless you invite others in.

Other than the gameplay mechanics itself (being more of a build your own class as opposed to tweaking a premade class.)

The game will have a large focus on PvP with competitive league challenges (everyone starting a new character on a select server at the same time, then trying to make the most progress- people furthest behind constantly eliminated)
Or just arena- and unlike many other ARPG's, the way they've balanced numbers encourages it.

However, it is always online- I'm not going to knock it because for the economy and competitive spirit they want in the game, you can't really accomplish it without always requiring online play.

Skills are on gems which go in slots on your gear, can be combined with support gems to change how they work/buff them. Skill gems level up and can be traded to other players.

Open ended class system, anyone can use any skill/weapon but there are stat requirements to use them.

Giant talent tree/web that's shared across the starting classes.

No gold, all trading is done through bartering.

Leader boards.

Different game modes in the works. Open world FFA PVP with player looting. Attrition based PvE mode requiring players team up and reserve resources. They are not out yet but have been tested some and are coming.

The ability to reroll an item (not sure if torchlight had this) or to simply buff the item up.

Tons of different and interesting builds due to the talent web. A lot have been showcased by Grinding Gear Games on their YouTube I recommend watching them.

Free to play with the only thing you can buy being mini pets, dance animations, character slots, bank tabs and special spell effects. You get 24 character slots for free and 4 big bank tabs free as well.

Randomized zones.

A map system similar to torchlight but maps have special properties to the zone they spawn and can be rerolled/buffed just like weapons/armor can.

Its wonderfully deep, wonderfully free, and playing heavily off the Nostalgia of Diablo 2. Its an ARPG in the old style of theorycrafting, punishing difficulty that nevertheless scales both ways quite well, and that great old thing of "Collect shit, port home, sell, return collect shit etc etc etc".

Well, it went into open beta today, so they added a whole nother Act to the game on top of whatever else. Think it was about 1 gig-1.5 gigs that you now have to download it. It wouldn't be a big deal, but their servers are pretty slammed.